The morals of the story

I wasn’t going to do any novel-writing yesterday but after a good night’s sleep and in the middle of a dog walk I found the first chapter – which had seemed such a muddle when I left it on Thursday – becoming clearer. I even had the idea to use one of the scenes (in a different form) that I wrote last week and thought was such rubbish.

So the morals of the story are:

·         nothing I do for the novel is wasted
·         rest and relaxation can be as productive as slaving over a hot keyboard
·         at this stage of the novel things can take time to unfold – I need to trust my own natural processes.

Remember that, B.

YouWriteOn

I’m thinking of joining YouWriteOn. This is a website set up by the Arts Council in which you review the first five to seven thousand words of someone else’s novel and they review yours. Each time you do a review for someone else (chosen at random) someone will do a review for you. When you have enough reviews you are entered into a chart, the top entries of which receive feedback from publishing editors. The site also – I think – has links to ebook publishing.

It’s not so much the last two services that interest me but the possibility of receiving feedback from other writers. I’ve tried writing groups and everyone is always much too polite to say anything helpful and any comments are fairly superficial. The YouWriteOn scoring system on the other hand seems quite detailed, with marks given on several different aspects, including plot, characters, setting and dialogue.

Already, this is bearing fruit. I thought it would be a simple matter to tidy up the beginning of my novel and get it ready to upload as I’ve already done quite a bit of work on it, but the possibility of it being being read by a peer (rather than a publisher) – someone I want to entertain, not impress – has completely changed my attitude to it. I want to rewrite it all. And the simple fact that someone might read it has made the writing fun again instead of something that could take years and then moulder on a shelf – which is very depressing.

It is a bit confusing though. Once you start pulling something to pieces it tends to fall apart. And then I don’t know where I am.

I keep telling myself however that it’s not surprising that I’m taking so long to get the hang of this fiction-writing caper. After all, I’ve only been doing it for about ten years, and sporadically in that time and with next to no guidance, whereas I’ve been writing non-fiction professionally since 1979 with plenty of editors breathing down my neck.

Does all this make sense? My brain’s in a bit of a whirl.

Input not output

I’ve done no daily pages, novel-writing or blogging for nearly a week. Instead we’ve been enjoying the delightful company of a soon-to-be-six-year-old great-niece and her mother.

Climbing a fallen tree

In a strop

 

Flying

Over-excited Dog

It takes me a long time to process new experiences these days, especially happy ones. I turn them over and over in my mind as if extracting every last morsel of nourishment from them. So it’s input rather than output for the moment. In other words, I’m easing myself gently back into writing. (Not to mention the fact that I over-indulged in wine, chocolate, grapes and biscuits last night as my way of releasing tension, having been on my best behaviour for four days (sort of), and am feeling slightly worse for wear today.)

Many thanks to Rachel for the photographs

Something else going on

Well, I’ve written two new scenes for The Novel so far, but both of them are rubbish. I didn’t know where they were going to fit into the plot so I couldn’t take them seriously and I let my mind run all over the place. The content was a mess and the style was atrocious.

Perhaps it’s all I can do at the moment. And, anything is better than nothing. I feel awful if I don’t write, so what does it matter if I feel awful when I do write?

I have a sense that there is something else going on here. Something to do with confidence and self-esteem.

The Green Woman

The Green Woman (copyright The Mountain )

Even though I hate The Novel I’m going to give it another try. Anything’s better than doing nothing. And it could be that it’s not really hate stopping me getting on with it, but all sorts of other emotions masquerading as hate – lack of confidence, despair, fear.

And my new totem picture is ‘The Green Woman’ as she appears on one of my t-shirts. She doesn’t lie on top of a cliffdaydreaming. She gets on with things.